In the Spotlight:
William Scheuerman
WEST announces its summer teaching opportunity for graduate students! All proposals must be received by December 1, 2008.
Attention Junior High and High School language teachers: save the date for the Language Teachers Summer Workshop, June 19-21, 2009.
Voices and Visions: Islam and Muslims in World Contexts – A new project at Indiana University hopes to break down some of the misconceptions about Islam and increase intercultural dialogue and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Indiana University's Center for West European Studies (WEST) promotes knowledge of Western Europe and the European Union through education, scholarship and public outreach. Our academic degree programs train specialists committed to strengthening transatlantic ties through careers in public service, business, research, and teaching.
WEST provides a flexible approach to the study of modern Europe through an interdisciplinary program of instruction. WEST offers two undergraduate minors, a master's degree, and a Ph.D. minor, as well as joint master's degrees with the School of Business (MA/MBA) and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (MA/MPA), ranked fifth and second in the nation, respectively.
As a Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, WEST provides a wide variety of resources to both the public and academic communities. We focus on the countries of Western Europe but have strong ties to other EU nations through our affiliation with the European Union Center. WEST sponsors conferences and workshops, and dozens of public lectures on Indiana University's campuses each year, on topics ranging from the social impact of Islam in Europe to the arts and music of Western Europe, from EU immigration and the politics of ethnic integration to environmental policy.
WEST promotes knowledge of contemporary Europe in the local community and beyond. Professional development opportunities are offered for K-12 educators, including workshops on teaching about Europe and grants for travel and curriculum development. WEST maintains an ongoing relationship with local businesses and IU's Center for International Business Education and Research to ensure a deep understanding of the European business environment. Dedicated to its outreach mission, WEST strives to provide an array of materials, experts and resources to further an understanding of contemporary Western Europe.
Indiana University's Bloomington campus is the ideal setting for WEST. IU's language departments are nationally recognized for their high quality. Regular offerings consist of over 40 modern languages, ten of them spoken in Western Europe - Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Yiddish, and Norwegian. Students of Western Europe or the expanding European Union also have the opportunity to bridge the gap between East and West by studying Slavic or Uralic and Altaic languages, representing the entire geographical range of European tongues, from Finnish in the north to Turkish in the Mediterranean, as well as Bulgarian, Romanian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Albanian, Slovene, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Russian, and Arabic.
Non-language course offerings span 8 schools and 20 departments; WEST affiliated tenured and tenure-track faculty number over 100. Students and faculty have access to the Herman B.Wells Library, which is both an EU and a UN depository and houses approximately 1.4 million serials and monographs relating to Western Europe.
